Yet More Persistent Fallacies

In drafting the Gaming Geek Fallacies,  the fundamental reason why I started this blog, I could’ve made that a much longer list.  Granted, I wanted to draw a parallel to the famous Five Geek Social Fallacies list that inspired them.  But these persistent fallacies have been kicking around my blog folder, and I might as well haul them out!

1) If The System Wasn't Written To Meet My Every Prejudice In Every Particular, It's No Good.

Quite aside from that if a game was exactly the way you wanted it to be, you'd be the game designer, and more likely defending it than bitching about it?  If you’re much younger than sixty, you came to adulthood in a world of a hundred TV channels, a zillion dining choices, Walkmans and iPods and all manner of options that ensured you never had to endure popular taste if you didn't want to do so, and you didn't have to work very hard to manage it, either.

The gaming grognards, however, remember a time when the rules were all badly written and opaque, and we had to rewrite them to suit. The degree to which I'm impressed by whining about rules people don't like is closely parallel to my feelings on hearing a grown child claim he can't dress himself or cut his own meat.  They are called "pencils" and "pens," folks.  Use them to X-out or alter those rules you don't like or, alternately, to add things you can't live without.  There's even a whiz-bang name for them: "house rules."  Catchy, ain't it?

2) The New Edition Of Game X Sucks!!! The Bastard Company Ruined It!!!

Something I find even more incomprehensible than the first one. So you don't like nWOD? Yeah, I think it was a dumb idea too. So don't play it. The previous edition works just as well today as it did when it was first published, and RPGs lack a sell-by date; no one is going to force your gaming group at gunpoint to switch. Delete nWOD, insert D&D 4th, GURPS 4th, Hero 5th, etc etc, as appropriate.

Yes, I know there's an intense fetish in this culture to only value the latest and newest of anything, but if you're that much of a mindless sheep, I don't see why you should expect respect for your POV.  I’m heartened by the retro movement in gaming, but bemused as to why people are spending so much time and effort coming up with “retroclones.”  Feel nostalgia for OD&D?  Well ... why not play OD&D?  You’re allowed; really you are.

3) MMORPGs / LARPs / Freeforms / Storygames Suck And Aren't REAL Roleplaying.

RP is RP is RP. Online gaming, freeform, storygames and LARPs are different than tabletop. All these styles have their advantages and disadvantages. I've played several forms, for many years apiece, and no one kind is "better" than the others. I may have opinions on particular games, but there is equally rich RP available in any venue, and equally munchkinesque asshattery in all.

What they are is different.  LARPs and online lack the institutionalized taboos against portraying sexuality, eroticism and evil that pervade tabletop.  Tabletop is much faster than LARPs -- and infinitely faster than MMORPGs -- in creating new things or making rules changes.  In MMORPGs, you don’t have to play with a party, you can game at 4 AM on a weeknight in your pajamas, and GMs aren’t telling you what to do every step of the way.  In LARPs, you can physically interact in a way possible nowhere else, RP can be a great deal more intense and realistic, and you can immerse for days at a time.  In tabletop, you can fine tune your character’s abilities in a way the game systems of other styles can’t match, and setting backgrounds are almost by definition far more detailed and rich.  In MMORPGs, you can interact with hundreds (thousands!) more PCs than in any other form.  And so on.

Really, this is just GGF#4 – My Game Is Great, Your Game Sucks – writ large.  People feel the need to disparage the Not Us game.  For instance, several key players on the gaming board I most frequent have a rabid (and, I feel, irrational) hate on for storygames, to the point that some have accused people who’ve seemed sympathetic to storygames or advocated games that were perceived to have “storygame” elements of having a Secret Storygames Agenda.

Seriously.  I really am not making this up.

(What a “storygames agenda” is I have no idea, but months down the road, I’m still shaking my head.)

4) The Hot New Game Has A Groundbreaking New Way Of Doing Things!

There are just a handful of fundamental elements to a RPG: what a character can do, how to adjudicate him or her doing it, what's the interaction between the character and the world. If a game decides that (for example) randomizing combat resolution is a good thing, there's no fundamental difference between flipping cards, grabbing chits, rolling 3d6, exploding dice pools, whatever. All you're doing is playing around with how the odds are calculated and resolved.

This fallacy also feeds the beast, so to speak, and has the designers of new systems scrambling around to find some way, any way, of distinguishing their system mechanics from all the rest.  This has led to some otherwise good indie RPGs to have some terribly silly key mechanics.

5) If You Want To Play A New Setting, You Have To Design A New Game Around It.

Generally applied to media licenses, I don’t understand this.  Look – I’ve written for media licenses: for Conan, for Middle-Earth, for Scarlet Pimpernel, for DC Comics.  Media licenses work under severe constraints. 

First off, the license holders (even when authors are decades-dead, as with Tolkien and Howard) get awfully sticky about creating new setting detail, however much gamers need those details and the authors never addressed them, and in some cases, competing ownership rights interfere.  The Serenity RPG was licensed from the movie, not the Firefly TV series, and couldn’t mention explicit elements from that series.  The FASA Star Trek game was licensed from the Franz Joseph group that held some independent rights through the Star Trek Technical Manual, but not from Paramount, and couldn’t address many elements from ST:TOS, never mind touch TNG with a ten-foot phaser.

Secondly, they’re generally written with an eye towards getting fans of the work into gaming, and so include a lot of elements and dumbed-down explanations which veteran gamers find unnecessary at best and patronizing at worst. 

Thirdly, the corebook is pretty slender (so as not to bombard those newbies with dozens of pages of combat rules), and much of the rest is taken up with recapitulations that hardcore fans find too scanty and hardcore RPGers find crowd out necessary rules. 

Fourthly, it's an axiom that no matter what you put out, half the fans will hate it with a hot, heavy hate. Either they won't like the system, or they won't like anything that isn't already canon, or they'll bitch that you included elements of the book/show they found lame, or bitch that you left out elements they loved, or they'll whine that you misinterpreted this or that.  Even more than the average situation in #2 above, too many of the base reject anything that doesn't reflect in every particular what they'd have written if they were in charge of the effort.

Fifthly, the licensed properties usually have short shelf lives.  The company running a MMORPG I used to play started a licensed game based on the Hercules and Xena TV shows ... after both series had stopped first run.  It never had many players, there was little scope for advertising, and the company voluntarily relinquished the license when the player base diminished to a trickle.  The Buffy RPG came out just weeks before the series wrapped, and suffered a similar fate.  Great, there were people babbling about it on Internet forums.  Go find a copy in a FLGS now; the company relinquished the license barely four years after it was first published, and it's long out of print.

Finally, the audience just isn't as large as people think it is. We weren't ‡ (say) peddling the Serenity RPG just to gamers. We weren't (say) peddling it just to gamers who like science fiction. We weren't (say) peddling it just to science fiction gamers who happen to be Firefly fans. We weren't (say) peddling it just to science fiction gamers who happen to be Firefly fans and don't mind the Cortex system. We were (say) peddling it to science fiction gamers who happen to be Firefly fans, don't mind the Cortex system and think the game writers did a good job. That is not an easy sell, and that breakdown applies to pretty much any licensed game.

Now compound this with having to design a new game system from scratch, one not only developed to be deliberately distinctive from other systems (because, you know, see #4 above) but less with an eye towards whether the system makes sense or not than towards whether key setting elements are highlighted.

It’s little wonder that only one licensed game – Call of Cthulhu – has ever had a permanent impact on the industry. 

‡ - past tense, because the company surrendered the license in 2011, just five years after publication.

Magic 'R Us

Knobgobbler, who's my most frequent commenter, mentioned in my most recent blog post concerning magic swords that a setting with magical items would have to have heaps of charlatans either pretending that they have powers or peddling fake magic items.  (Heck, it wouldn't even take a setting with ubiquitous magical items.  Isn't Earth's history filled with such charlatans?)

I'm in complete and longstanding agreement.  One of the more offbeat groups in that line is an outfit in the capital city out of which my main group works I informally call "Magic 'R Us."  The description in my binder runs thus:

This cheerful lot of young magicians are in the business of supplying minor enchantments and magical items to locals at substantial discounts to the prices more usually found citywide.  Though none are journeymen, they are the nominal apprentices of San Nath Catalis, a retired Almuensin, and Sana Nirasta val Arcolon, a Fruningen Starlight wizard.  Both are far more interested in counting their profits than interfering with the business or teaching their "apprentices," but despite the College's unhappiness over the situation, they fulfill the letter of the law.  Quality is respectable for what it is (at least no major disasters have yet been recorded), and so far the band has remained quite cohesive.

The College of Mages is the multinational outfit that seeks (with varying degrees of success) to regulate the use of magic.  Their sway in Warwik City is relatively strong, and one of the laws they've successfully seen enacted prohibits anyone from practicing magic for profit who doesn't have a journeyman's license from the College ... that, or who is working under the direction of a journeyman or master, which covers apprentices.   Hence Magic 'R Us, which has franchised out to some villages in the region.  One of the branches PCs have come across is in the village of Athelren, which is halfway on the great highway between Warwik City and the south coast:

The first "branch" of the eponymous outfit, set up by an Athelren native, who goes by "Shadowdove" (she hates her given name, Paline).  She is an Almuensin senior apprentice who felt she was going to wash out on her journeyman trials and fled the city.  Here in her home village, she is what passes for a wizard, and skirts a dangerous line: she has not told anyone she is not a journeyman, and does not operate under the direction of a master.  She has a modest command of Earth (useful locally), Creation (less so) and Sensory (not particularly) magics, and can enchant ... just barely.  Her spell floor is -12.

This outfit really ticks off the College, and my PCs have generally been very down on it.  The most powerful PC wizard in the campaign's history is currently active, and she's a Warwik native who for the past few years has been (respectively) the local Master of Apprentices, and then one of the College's handful of "Intermediate Masters," the College's hit squad and responsible for magical law enforcement.  Elaina has no use whatsoever for Magic 'R Us -- which is comical, because her family business is an inn catering to pirates, and she's pretty laissez faire otherwise -- and has occasionally sought to shut it down.

The Ordinary Magic Sword

Princess Verella and Meldil

I recall a gaming forum discussion on magic swords, and magic items in general, where the sentiment was running against “common” magical items – and against the concept of scaling owned items up in power as the PCs gained experience – and in favor of “unique” and “storied” items.  One person asked:

Certainly there's something very cool about creating a sword or wand or whatever that has a storied history and special unique powers... but do you want EVERY item to be that way? Do you feel like there should never just be a +1 sword?

No.

The game I play has enchantment rules. My gameworld's cities have a number of qualified enchanters, and they make their livings enchanting things. Since the lower end enchantments are by far the easiest and cheapest to make, by the nature of the beast there are going to be a relatively large number of +1 Puissance weapons out there, which take less than a twentieth the time of (say) +2 Puissance, +2 Accuracy, Quick-Draw, Loyal Sword broadswords. Since said +1 Puissance weapon takes 250 mage-days to enchant with my houseruling of GURPS, and the ability to enchant in the first place isn't common among wizards, this isn't anything a lowly PC is going to buy off the rack.

But that being said, I see no reason why an item's "storied history" should have much to do with its OOC system stats. The legendary Dragon Crown of the Emperors of Vallia doesn't become legendary because of its stats; it's legendary because it's been worn by three thousand years' worth of monarchs. No one knows the actual stats of the great warsword Meldil, borne on half a hundred battlefields by the renowned Princess Verella Elyanwe; it's famous because it's wielded by a great hero. Does it actually cleave iron as if it were wood? (Or is it the case, in truth, that the beautiful elven hero-princess has particularly florid and fanciful minstrels composing her tales?)

It wasn’t always this way, and D&D isn’t really to blame.  My first campaign as a player was an Empire of the Petal Throne run in 1978, and we just got flooded with stuff, in tried-and-true Monty Haul fashion. So much so that we players – sick and tired of scenarios being solved with our widgets instead of our wits – got together and agreed to pick just three items apiece to keep, and throw away all of the rest.

How would I change the paradigm?  If I had to do it all over again (unfortunately, the making of relatively simple items is too entrenched in my gameworld), I'd eliminate any spell or ability that analyzed the particulars of a magical item, and make the result of any enchantment unpredictable. The only way to figure out what something did would be empirical. Enchantments become things of mystery only if they're mysterious, and if you can't know – for certain – everything about it. Make it mechanistic, know for a certain fact that the bolts from a Staff of Reaming do 1d+2 crushing damage, that they have a range of 10 hexes, and that the Staff has 11 charges and 15 HT, then it's no more "wonderful" than 50' of hemp rope or five pounds of smoked cod.

Heck, you could even ring in items that people thought were magical, and really weren't.  I did this writeup on another site, and bet some of you could use this as an idea in your own campaigns:

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One of the most significant finds to come out of the haunted ruins of the city of Telmora, Deathreaper is a giant battlebrand, five and a half feet in length.  Wrought of some black glossy metal and engraved with fell runes of annihilation, the only color on the blade is the well-worn silver wire wrapping the hilt.  Through some eldritch sorcery, it is light as a willow wand in the wielder's hand ... but that is not all.  When waved over the wielder's head, Deathreaper erupts in dark violet flames (which somehow do not burn the wielder), and the runes on the blade sear with stabbing blue radiance.  The howls of dozens of voices split the air, screaming in horror and anguish, eternally damned.  It is said that to die on Deathreaper's point is to have your immortal soul destroyed, sucked into the blade for all time, to join the chorus of the hell-caged and be seared in the unholy flame of the brand.

The warrior-mage Thenestre, who found the sword, is now a feared man.  Standing taller, standing prouder, the power of Deathreaper fills him with its blazing might.  It is said that as long as he carries the sword he is invincible, and that even if he is parted from the blade, it will fly through the air to his defense ... and find his foe.  And drink.

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That's the shtick, anyway.  As a warrior, Thenestre is nothing much.  As a mage, he's a decent weaver of illusions and tolerably good at minor summonings.  As an adventurer, he's quite a con artist.  Reading of the adventures of a legendary champion bearing a hell-forged black soulsucking sword, he wondered whether he could do one better.  "Deathreaper" is, with the help of a dwarven confederate, a few layers of enameled foil over a core of pinewood.  A little engraving took care of the "runes of annihilation" (which came out of the Big Little Book of Wyzardry, 4491 edition), and a couple of enchanted illusions takes care of the lighting and sound effects.  Well, everyone knows that Thenestre was assisting Master Thormor on the dig in the northern part of the Old City ... or at least they believe it when Thenestre tells them that he was.

Thenestre can whip the sword around with the best of them, and light as it is, he makes it look easy.  He bolsters it by summoning "bodies" which he artistically disguises with illusion to have large holes in them and features contorted in horror, claiming that they were rascals who tried to steal from him.  He hasn't had to do more than brandish it since -- many a brave warrior, bold enough against mortal steel, wants no part of a dark destroyer forged in the very Fires of Hell itself!  And now Thenestre is "somebody," a renowned adventurer, someone who doesn't have to buy many of his own drinks, someone who can run up tabs at the tailors and the taverns, someone who gets his share of the women attracted to the Dark Anti-Hero.

Adventure hooks: 

1)  Sooner or later, there'll be some up and coming punk stickjock who wants to prove how bad he is by taking down the "legendary" Thenestre!  And maybe he'll run before the full fury of Deathreaper ... and maybe he won't.

2)  Sooner or later, there'll be some up and coming punk thief who wants to prove how bad he is by stealing the "legendary" Deathreaper!  And maybe he'll go down before the anti-theft illusions Thenestre sets (most nights, when he remembers, when he isn't too drunk, when he's not occupied with the groupie de jour) ... and maybe he won't.

3)  Sooner or later, Master Thormor -- or someone else familiar with the Telmori site -- might come into town and recall Thenestre as a minor assistant who didn't merit anything beyond the antique emerald brooch that was his share of the loot, and three weeks' pay ... certainly no ancient artifact sword.  Of which none were recovered, not in working order, anyway.  (Alternately, a researcher of the period might know, or uncover, that no such weapon is recorded in the annals of the Triolini Empire.)

4)  There are real dark forces in the world.  Forces which covet the power of Deathreaper, and seek to take it for their own.  (They might even hire the party to do it, and might not react well to being told "Oh, yeah, we stole the weapon you wanted, but gosh, it's a fake, here it is.")

LGBT in gaming, Gossip Column style

The notion of gay, bisexual, or transgender characters has come up in many a discussion forum thread.  It’s an astonishingly contentious topic, running the gamut of “Why do our games need to mention s-e-x at all?” to “People who want this stuff mentioned are pushing The Gay Agenda,” to “OMG that game company’s new city book had two gay couples in it” – out of a hundred hetero PCs – “so the company must be Pushing The Gay Agenda!!”

So I could write a coherent rant on the subject, or I could just do this in letters-to-the-gossip-columnist style, with excerpts from posts, and my response to them, from over the last decade.

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In another discussion, on another forum, I was just reminded of a game of D&D 3.5 I played a while ago. I wanted my character to be bisexual because it just fit with the whole androgynous glam-rock Bard thing he had going. The DM disallowed it "because of the setting" ... Anyway, I was just wondering how many people play sincerely gay/bisexual characters or use them as NPCs.

Yeah, I would've been all over that DM like white on rice. "Exactly what about your setting is incompatible with bisexual characters, and what is your explanation for why that is?"

I've played a bisexual character in the past, and gay/bi NPCs are in my world a fair bit, to the degree that the PCs are aware of their sexuality. Some of my world's cultures are less than welcoming towards them; most don't care.  One culture in which there was an extended adventure recently has a third, neutral gender, which you'd think wouldn't be all that hard to manage with pervasive magic.

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Honestly, I don't think there's a need for even introducing sexuality in most RPGs. Why would you even bother stating your characters sexual preference? Is it such a significant part of who he/she is that you need to specify?

Gosh, I don't know. Is your character's religion pertinent? His or her background quirks? Do we need to know that your character was an orphan, enslaved as a child, is buggy about heights, or that you have a fetish for hidden knives? And do we really need to know that your characters visit brothels (in a approved, he-man, heterosexual fashion, of course) or that they flirt with the cute NPCs (in an approved, he-man, heterosexual fashion, of course)?

So why do we? It's called character development. Unless there's some reason, unique to all of human emotion and endeavor, to exclude sexuality from those traits? Exactly what about our settings is incompatible with overt mentions of such things, and what is your explanation for why that is?

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That's pretty easy, actually. "The gods created the mortal races, and none of them saw any need to make any portion thereof homosexual in nature." There's no particular reason to make it a part of the setting unless it's something your players really want to explore, so it's pretty darn easy to omit.

To which I'd respond to the latter with "Well, plainly you do have at least one player interested in exploring non-hetero characters."

The former? Unless the GM could whip out the printout showing me that was already a part of acknowledged doctrine, I'd have to ask why in a pantheon -- as typical RPG pantheons run -- where the gods agree on nothing, from who created the world to moral codes to common dress for clerics to what races are subhuman, the only thing upon which they DO agree (unanimously, yet) is that everyone is 100% hetero? Say what?

I'd bet a twenty against a dime that the result'd be GM hang-ups rather than a genuine explanation.   Even giving the GM the (very large) benefit of the doubt, I'd be no more enthused to play in that person's campaign than under any GM who when confronted with an unconventional RP trait responded with "Well, you just can't play that way.  Urrr, well, hurr ... because you just can't, that's why."

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... if someone created a male character in your game and mentioned in the backstory that they had a wife, would that similarly annoy you? Would you tell them that you didn't want them introducing sexuality into the game and ask why they felt the need to state their character's sexual preference?

Yeah. The very next time I hear a gamer make such a complaint will be the very first. 

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But why would anyone want to play a gay character unless they were pushing the agenda?  I’m not the only player who objects to this!

What I'm surprised there are some people missing is that roleplaying is a broad church, with a lot of folks doing things that others find boring, objectionable or outright grotesque.

Would you think so concerning other areas of gaming? Would anyone respond to a post about wanting to play a hardboiled 1950s detective, "Why would anyone bother?" or "Well, my campaign is medieval fantasy." Okay, sure, fair enough, but some folks like playing fantasy, and some like playing steampunk, and some like vampires, and some like chaotic evil characters and some like Star Wars and so on and so forth, and no doubt there are some campaigns out there that do, indeed, channel Archie Goodwin or Mike Hammer.

Or would you think so regarding more basic traits?  I want to play a thief.  Do you object, because stealing is morally wrong?  I want to play my character as willing to torture enemies to get information out of them.  Do you object, because torture is morally despicable?  Do you object to my characters being smokers?  Promiscuous (well, safely heterosexually, anyway)?  Atheists?  What other traits do you feel you should have veto power over me playing?

(2019 addendum:  In rereading this, a tangential thought struck me, about "pushing the gay agenda."  Y'know, a lot of idjits say things like this.  About 99.95% more than actually get around to defining what this "gay agenda" really means.  Are they suggesting that all NPCs ought to be drag queens?  That plotlines must mimic The Birdcage or La Cage Aux Folles?  I bet most of these chumps would squirm in their seats and mumble inarticulately if asked to define "the gay agenda."  Which, I daresay, would boil down to "Hey, we exist, guys," in any event.  Just sayin'.  It's all a heap of bullshit meant to deflect the question.)

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No one's advocated doing that, though. There's a big difference between eliminating homosexuality because of personal biases and not including it because it serves no purpose in the campaign setting. Again, if it's not something your players express an interest in, why bother?

I question upon what, if any, basis homosexuality would "serve no purpose" in any campaign setting whatsoever. It's a human trait.  It's no more setting dependent – or setting violating – than claustrophobia, a love for music, a tendency towards athleticism, OCD, or a thousand other personality or physical traits within the range of human expression.

Now you certainly can have settings where it isn't likely to come into play, where it might be inconvenient, unwelcome or outright dangerous/illegal/proscribed. Certainly a homosexual character in a WWII or Holy Lands campaign has to keep a tight lid on things, no error.

But I'm afraid my reaction to the "Err, it just doesn't exist in my campaign because, erm, it serves no purpose" would almost always be "Yeah, right, the only underpinning to that is that the notion of guys getting it on with guys squicks you out so much you can't even handle the theoretical concept."  Beyond that, we're not talking about a campaign that doesn't include matters sexual in it because no one wants to touch that trope -- any more than the one the OP cited.  We're talking about making a point of banning homosexuality from characterizations.

Fair enough; there are a lot of folks who can't handle it, and a lot of homophobes who refuse to handle it. I just don't need to let them be in charge of my escapism.

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But frankly, at high levels, a fantasy character is akin to a force of some fickle sort of nature. This is not a sexually-charged setting, and making a fantasy world into one seems to be shoehorning something in that was never meant to be there.

Not in the fantasy you prefer to play, demonstrably, and it is no more or less a "sexually charged setting" as the players prefer. I've certainly played in campaigns that were nothing more than one-dimensional collections of stats and where all we did was, indeed, kill them and take their stuff. I've also played in campaigns where eroticism was a major theme (to date, I've had six characters married to the characters of fellow PCs).  "Never meant to be there?"  Says WHO, sport?

But you know something? I don't play steampunk or nihilistic fantasy or Vampire LARPs. D&D leaves me cold, and what is termed "D&D Fantasy" leaves me a lot colder. There are a great many systems, milieus and styles I haven't played, and a good many I wouldn't play. I stop far short of airily stating that sexuality, eroticism and/or romantic tropes were "never meant to be" in a fantasy world, the more so in that I can quote a good many fantasy works where they are major elements. Anyone want to claim that sexuality and/or romantic entanglements don't form a significant plot element in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time? That even as the quintessesial kill-them-and-take-their-stuff protagonist, Conan the Barbarian's motivated in a lot of plots by heaving bosoms? From Lois McMasters Bujold (The Sharing Knife books) to Marion Zimmer Bradley (Darkover) to Michael Moorcock (Eternal Champion) to Tanith Lee (damn near every adult book she wrote) to Robert Heinlein (Glory Road) to Harry Turtledove (Videssos) to Robert Adams (Horseclans) -- and that's just a casual glance at two of my bookshelves -- those themes are everywhere. Heck, Elizabeth Lynn was writing fantasy works with explicit LGBT sex scenes in them decades ago.

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But NPCs are just that: non-player characters. They're co-stars at best and even in story heavy games they shouldn't be given the attention that player characters command. Why should I care about an NPC's sexuality and how will I know unless it's established IE they're married or in a known relationship?

Whether you care or not isn't the point. It's whether the NPCs who've been presented are straight or otherwise. I'd say the 99% total is pretty much accurate.  I'm going to provide some evidence of my own. The city in my setting in which I've done the most work has over 1100 locations, and I've given information on 498 NPCs. Of that total, 143 are explicitly (or presumed) hetero, oftentimes through identification of an opposite sex spouse or children ... although my wife being the daughter of a gay man, I know how much that's worth.  Fifteen characters are explicitly gay.

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If I'm in a combat-focused game like D&D or Pathfinder, sexuality never enters into it except the occasional off-color joke. So there's no need to worry about homosexuality in the game; I'm more worried about initiative and flanking bonuses.

In other words, spouses, children and anything -- including plotlines -- that references marriage don't exist? No one has any heirs? There aren't any brothels? No NPCs ever introduces you to a wife or a husband?  If your response is "nope, never," then fair enough. (Pretty damn weird setting for anything beyond dungeon fantasy, but meh, whatever.  Which, by the bye, excludes Pathfinder, which has a pretty richly developed setting, AND which includes explicitly gay NPCs.) 

If not, then of course you have sexuality in the game.

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Now if that decision to include GBLT NPCs clashes with the adventure background, then I believe it damages the adventure because it will appear to be shoehorned in for political reasons.

Just out of curiosity, how would mentioning that a NPC happened to be LGBT clash with an adventure background, any more than a casual mention that a NPC happened to be hetero (by virtue, say, of an opposite sex partner)?

As for political reasons, well ... that would say a great deal more about you and your state of mind than anything else, hmm?

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If that information does not have a direct bearing on the adventure, then why include it? How many adventures do you know of that call attention to the sexual preferences of the NPCs if that sexual preference does not have a bearing on the adventure?

Well, for starters, suppose you let me decide for myself what has a "direct bearing" on the adventure or not, and I'll even return the favor and let you decide for yourself. I might even be one of those GMs who likes to include local color and flavor to my adventures, and come up with details that have no bearing on solving a tactical problem. (Come to that, I might even be one of those GMs whose gaming isn't always based around solving tactical problems.)

It's funny that you bring up Village of Hommlet {{NB: the speaker did in the original}}.  On the very first entry in which the village is described -- two pages into the booklet -- we see that the head of a house is a manly man, and there's a "large goodwife," and several children. Location #2? An elderly "master and mistress" and their son. Location #3? The local woodcutter, his wife, and three young children. Location #4? A widow and her two grown sons. Location #5? A widower and his five children. Location #6? The leatherworker, his wife and their three children. Location #7? The innkeeper, his wife, and their children. (The inn is named, as you surely know, the "Welcome Wench," and depicts a buxom serving maid on its sign. Are you arguing that that has nothing to do with sexuality?)

In all, twenty-five of the 33 numbered locations in the village mention the sexual preference of the inhabitants -- if all male, and all with housewives who have no part of business. Why do I need to know this? What kind of -- what was your turn of phrase again? -- direct bearing does the number of small children of the stonemason or the marital status of the carpenter have to do with the plot of the adventure?

Perhaps, while you're so eager to have your questions answered, you can answer that one.

As it happens, I own 38 other adventures written for D&D. Anyone want to bet me that there's as many as ONE that never mentions a spouse, never mentions a brothel, never mentions a child?

✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵ ✵

One reason I love my wife is that she can often anticipate my thoughts. In marching in the Boston Pride Parade a few years back, we were talking about whether we'd be marching in them ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road, I was raising my finger for my next point, and she glanced sidelong at me and said, "It's not even that you don't want to be marching here ten years from now. You don't want this parade to exist ten years from now."

And she was right, and she knew the reason: that however much that parade evolved from a desperate protest in the face of shrieking bigots throwing things to a joyous celebration, it'd be lovely to live in a world tolerant enough that it wouldn't even occur to anyone to have a parade for a segment of sexuality ... any more than we have parades celebrating blondes, vegetarians, hockey fans or any other human aspect or trait.

We're not quite there yet. It's sobering to realize that topics on alternate sexuality in our escapism routinely provoke hundred of posts and thousands of page views.

Sticking To A System

Not as a rule a habitue of gaming stores -- I've gamed out of my home almost exclusively since the mid-80s -- what I see about how other gamers think comes from a couple of online forums.  One of the common themes you see on such forums is the premise that a Real Gamer Tries Many Games, and threads about diversity in selection are frequent.  In particular, a number of people heavily tout a willingness to try many so-called "indie" games (i.e., self-published games of which 95% of the RPG public have never heard) as a needful virtue.

Being asked my own opinion, I reply that I started GMing The Fantasy Trip in 1983, flipped to its successor system GURPS when it was in playtest a couple years later, and have pretty much GMed nothing else since.  An answer considered unremarkable when the system you solely play is D&D (or, these days, Pathfinder), this bugs a surprising number of people.  What's the point of doing that? I've been asked.

For one thing, I don't dance around genres much. I've done some SF, done some Firefly (not quite the same as space opera), done some French Revolution. Mostly, though, I've been doing the same setting, genre and milieu since 1978.

This has its advantages. I know my gameworld to an eyepopping degree. I have DECADES of prepwork behind me. Detailed realms. MULTIPLE cities with hundreds of businesses apiece. Hundreds of NPCs, many of which have detailed notes. 20 page writeups for religions for the in-depth priest. Etc etc ad nauseam.

So tell me, why would I forfeit the sheer knowledge there to run Some Other Setting? I couldn't possibly do the same job. I don't have the time or the energy to duplicate all that work ... or at my age, the longevity left. I'd have to say "I don't know" a lot more often, and slow up play to think up an answer.  (And I'd sure get caught out a lot, when the players knew I was wrong, and was contradicting myself.)

That's how I feel about switching systems. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there is a setting I want to run, and that X System is "better" than GURPS for running that setting. (This being an argument made about a hundred times more often than it's been proven, and has always seemed to me an attempt at self-justification, but let's go with it.)

But I understand GURPS. I have long experience in creating characters, and long experience in shepherding others through character creation. I know how the combat system works. I know how the magic system works, and I've created hundreds of new spells to go with it. I don't have to refer to a rulebook very often at all during runs. I know the weaknesses of the system - or at least those elements I feel to be weak - and have come up with variations and houserules to cover the gaps.

So tell me, why would I forfeit the sheer knowledge there to run Some Other Game System? I couldn't possibly do the same job. I don't have the time or the energy to duplicate all that learning. I'd have to say "I don't know" a lot more often, and slow up play to look up the answer.  (And I'd sure get caught out a lot, when the players knew I was wrong, and was contradicting the rulebook.)  Never mind that once again, at my age, I just don't learn as fast or as easily as once I did ...

I don't have GM ADD, I'm not enough of a moron to feel that a game system which wasn't invented last year is "obsolete," I don't ascribe unique virtues to systems just because they're published by the creator, I'm not rich enough to drop hundreds of dollars on corebooks and splatbooks every switch, and I'm not insane enough to insist my players go through the same relearning process just because I have a short attention span.

There. That's the point.

Spicier Cities

There's a set of tables for more interesting cities out there, from a blogger, called "One-Roll Cities" (actually, they're quite a few rolls, with a fistful of dice), fitting with the Reign RPG.  One of the tables lists ten interesting attributes a city might have.  I found the idea good but the execution scanty, and here's the one I did up in response, fifty deep.  Enjoy!

1.  Constantinople: The city has massive defenses of legendary stature, has never fallen to assault, and is considered impregnable.

2.  Akita:  There is a famous monument with miraculous properties.

3.  Baghdad:  A key element of infrastructure has fallen into disrepair from neglect or lack of funds, causing major impairments to business, lifestyle or public order.

4.  Mainz:  The printing press has exploded into consciousness; broadsheets and handbills cover every lamppost and wall, and books in the vernacular are affordable.

5.  Ur:  At least some of the infrastructure predates the known history of the city, and in its durability points to secrets of construction long since lost.

6.  Eburacon: There is a magical icon which awaits the return of a Sacred Ruler, and will only respond to that one.

7.  Paris:  The city is a marvel of planning, and the streets are on the whole well lit and maintained.

8.  Odessa:  The city has an extensive sewer system/catacombs. Huge.  Big enough to hold a city of its own.

9.  Alexandria:  The city has a colossal artifact which has been a landmark for all of history.

10.  Stonehenge:  A major supernatural site is well known, and the subject of much pilgrimage and study.

11.  Avonlea:  There is one outstanding unspoken quirk, such as red-colored roads, for no good or known reason.  Natives are either amazingly proud of it or blandly incurious.

12.  Providence:  The city is noted as a refuge for an exiled faction, race or religious group.

13.  Plymouth:  A city with historical significance well beyond its size or geopolitical/economic impact.

14.  New England:  Everything is historical, or is fancied to be.  You can scarcely travel a block before tripping over a commemorative plaque, a monument, a Tree of Liberty or some other historic site.

15.  Appalachia:  The city has unusual folkways distinctive from the regional culture.

16.  Everwood:  Many prominent structures are repurposed older buildings, and obviously so; churches turned into marketplaces, for instance.

17.  Salem:  A tourist center based on terrible events.

18.  Seattle:  A trick of local geography has weather significantly worse than the region’s in one particular fashion: very muggy in summer, rains too much year round, high snowfall in winter, the like.

19.  San Francisco:  The city is built on steep hills; there are many terraces, switchbacks, funiculars and stairs.

20.  Las Vegas:  The city is new, with either little in the way of history or little respect for such history as exists; old buildings are razed for new ones, all architecture is modern, and not much is built to last.

21.  Boston: The city is a trendsetter in a field of arts, culture or literature.

22.  Pleasantville:  Everyone is nice, quiet and traditional, and outsiders or strange ways draw a lot of attention.

23.  Manãna:  There is a strong culture of laissez faire, and stirring people to prompt, decisive action is difficult.

24.  Geneva: This city is well respected for its neutrality, and is frequently used as a meeting ground between warring or contending parties.

25.  La Serenissima: Residents do things the way they have always done, and are staunchly resistant to progress.

26.  Centralia: An ongoing man-made environmental disaster seriously impacts the health of the residents.

27.  New Orleans: The city lives for partying and spectacle, and the festivities go all night long ...

28.  Hong Kong:  Business – and The Deal – is the raison d’etre, and the overwhelming focus of the populace.

29.  Chicago:  The people want to be a major player, and think their home is, but suffer from an inferiority complex where the national/regional capital is concerned.

30.  Compostela:  The city is a major pilgrimage site, above and beyond its normal ecclesiastical footprint.

31.  Jericho: The city is one of the – if not the – oldest cities in the world, and the ruins of older iterations of the city are nearby/underneath.

32.  Los Angeles: Celebrities from the arts/sports are lionized, and their every utterance is on every tongue.

33.  Memphis: A major, international celebrity has a compound here.

34.  Star’s Hollow:  Eclectic, unique festivals are held every month, and it seems that whenever you’re there, there’s yet another offbeat parade or fest, for which much of the city shuts down.

35.  Minas Ithil: There is a spiritual sense to the city; either bright and elating, uplifting to the populace, or a dark miasma, corrupting and darkening every spirit.

36.  Venice: The Golden Age is long past, and people cling to shadows of ancient glories, sure that things will never get better again.  Buildings, dress, trappings are all beautiful and once-costly, but now shabby, faded and worn.

37.  Manhattan:  The residents have a positive, cheerful outlook and are sure Things Are Getting Better in this best of all possible worlds.

38.  St. Petersburg: The glitter and grandeur of the palaces of the aristocracy rub up against desperate slums, and the gulf between the haves and have-nots is unusually wide.

39.  Jakálla: The residents are xenophobic (and violent about it) to a high degree, and obvious foreigners leave their own insular districts at some risk.

40.  Peyton Place:  Everyone’s in everyone else’s business, and the notion of privacy is considered quaint and somewhat suspect.

41.  Gotham City:  The city has seen it all in its day, and attempts to improve its reputation or make cultural improvements are difficult and meet with resistance.

42.  Levittown: Everyone’s more or less of the same socioeconomic strata.  All the buildings are pretty much the same.  Most everyone pretty much acts the same.  Conformity in all things is the chief virtue.

43.  Belfast:  The city's just this side of a war zone, with hostile factions committing frequent depredations upon one another, often in defiance of the law.  Outsiders, based on the color of clothing they wear or a turn of phrase they use, are often assumed to be a member of a faction, and in any event are quizzed as to where they stand.

44.  Hershey:  The city has a renowned product or good.  Everything is about that product, every business revolves around it, every bit of architecture or art features or celebrates it, and everyone is either scared to death or provoked to rage at any threat to or disparagement of it.

45.  Dhaka:  A periodic natural hazard -- terrible winters, annual floods -- is a major but predictable problem for the city.  Either locals prepare for some weeks for the event (and risk being wrongfooted if the timing is off) or are dourly fatalistic over its impact.

46.  Juneau:  The city is geographically isolated, and cannot easily be reached by any land route ... if at all.

47.  London:  An integral part of the city's infrastructure -- or the prevailing technology -- is the most advanced in the world by far.  It's a major source of civic pride, and travelers from around the world come to study it.

48.  Jerusalem:  Multiple faiths (or sects of the same faith), hostile to one another, regard the city as a sacred site; at the very least, ill feelings visibly simmer.

49.  Strasbourg:  The city has a strategic location which has caused it to be invaded, and conquered, many times in its history.  Its population is ethnically and/or religiously diverse, with the most recently conquered faction being very unhappy with the reversal of fortune.

50.  Rome:  Once, the known world was ruled from this city.  Though those days are long past, its natives carry themselves with an arrogance born of ancient times, and upstart empires still seek the approval of -- or the rule over -- the imperial capital of old.

So, backstories ...

"Gamer ADD" in action.

Most of us have run into GMs who’ve asked people to submit a couple biographical pages about their PCs – who they are, where they’ve been, what’s led them to adventuring, what might their motivations be.  Some gung-ho players turn these in to GMs, unasked.

It’s a surprisingly controversial subject, and discussions of it on forums – which invariably start with the topic creator shaking his fists at the notion – explode into many dozens of posts worth of tirade. 

For my part, I love them.  From a new player, it tells me – above all – that he or she is likely to be a strong roleplayer, certain to view the character as more than a piece on a chessboard.  It’s reasonable to assume that the player is going to be unusually interested in setting details, and I’ve got a very dense setting.  They provide plothooks, they provide motivations, they make it easier to introduce NPCs, they're good for getting past the awkward "Why in the heck do these people want to adventure together?" They aid me in helping the players create their characters - certainly even the one-line stories some have mentioned above like "I'm an ex-gladiator who bought his freedom" and "The king ordered the murder of my parents" suggest skill sets, advantages and disadvantages obvious to many of you.

Am I intimidated by them? Certainly not. Some are good, some are crap, some are too long, some don't tell me anything I couldn't have figured out from the character sheet ... yeah, I figure that someone with Farming skill and five weapon skills probably was a farmer who decided to go off to become a warrior, thanks ever so.

Now there are certainly campaigns where backstories are pointless.  High-mortality?  No need to write a background for a PC who’s going to be dead inside of three sessions.  Hack-n-slash?  If the campaign’s not about roleplaying, a roleplaying tool doesn’t make much sense.  But otherwise?  Allow me to dig into my archives and toss out some common complaints:

* So the players gave you different amounts of backstory?  I don't consider this any more of a problem than when Player B goes into extensive RP with the NPCs and the others don't, or when Player A uses sound, well-reasoned tactics and the others don't, or when Player C takes the trouble to learn the rule system and the others can't be bothered.  Yes, there are players who hate to put pen to paper. There are also players who hate to roleplay, players who hate to read so much as a page of rules and players who can't stand plans more complex than "I walk up to the dude I think is the bad guy and hit him with my sword." I don't go out of my way to nerf those who go to some trouble in order to provide lowest common denominator gaming for the lazy or the mediocre.  Players who put time and trouble into the game get more benefits than those who don't.

* So you can’t stand the player who wants to blather about the cool things his character did in the “past?” People do that a lot in real life. But it's not as if we neuter combat because there are players who are combat-obsessed, or eliminate loot because some players go completely over the top in treasure-grubbing, or eliminate character creation because some players get obsessive over that.  A GM who doesn't have "Nice try, but no," in his or her arsenal is hamstrung from Day One.

* So most backstories are written like bad fanfics? And I suppose GMs are all a combination of Frank Capra, John Grisham and Spencer Tracy? You're all expert plotters and character actors? I sure like getting a couple of well-written pages over a couple of poorly written pages, but c’mon?

* So you don't like getting a five page backstory? Quite aside from that many GMs have background handouts / webpages that run a hell of a lot more than five pages, and that I have little sympathy for GMs complaining that reading five pages at the start of a campaign will break them -- this while using a stack of 500 pages worth of corebook and splatbook rules -- there's a startlingly simple answer: no one's forcing you to read it.

* So you believe that backstories are stupid and every trait should be developed through play? Great. Don't write one, and develop all your PCs' traits through play. What? Your players might have different play styles and likes and dislikes than you do, and aren't necessarily going to play the exact same characters you would in the exact same way you'd choose?

* So a backstory might clash with your setting?  Ah, but there's this marvelous invention called a pen. When reading through a backstory, if there's a bit that clashes, take that pen and draw a line through the offending material. Hand it back to the player and tell her about the clash. Why, you've even informed your players more about your setting by doing so! Win-win.

* So you’re secretly worried that your world won’t be as awesome as what the player envisons?   Since when did this become a zero-sum competition, where people are so afraid of the possibility of excellence that it has to be banned?  Are players writing backstories really so self-absorbed that they're ignoring the other players, if not the whole rest of the setting, but at the same time are thinking "Aha! I'm going to stick it to those mediocre bastards, who of course can't possibly be as creative and skilled as I am, and show them who's the real author of the bunch! Take that!"

* So you’re puzzled that a player wants to introduce stuff into the game before play starts?  So what?  I don’t imagine someone who wants to be engaged with your setting before play won’t care any more thereafter, do you?  I've been creating for over thirty years now, and I'm not remotely close to done. I'm not only quite happy for players to take some of that burden off my hands, but to bring their ideas and concepts – ones I might not have thought up on my own – to the game. I'm also quite happy when they're thought out in more detail than three minutes of bull session around the dice and potato chips, and I'm somewhat at a loss to figure out why such creation taking place outside of game sessions needs to be reflexively disqualified.

* So you don’t like a player developing friends and family outside of play sessions and think that RP should solely be contained around the gaming table?   I'm likely to make a great many other choice that you yourself wouldn't make in my shoes. You might hate playing rogue/mercenary types. I like them. You might hate playing hardbitten survival experts. I like them. You might hate playing characters who fuss over equipment lists. I don't. You might have no use for characters who avoid frontal assaults. I do.  Sorry, but I don't want you choosing the degree I have insta-camaraderie with the group at the expense of the character's life to date, any more than I want you dictating the type of character I play as well as his personality traits. Come to that, I believe I can figure out for myself what constitutes a more enjoyable game experience.  If I believe that involves an elaborate backstory, that's my decision. I won't require my GM read it – at least I won't be any stuffier about it than he'll be about me reading his handouts – but I don't expect guff about the degree to which I pay attention to it and play according to it.

* So you think the character will change far beyond the realm of any backstory?  I agree: the person my character will be a year from now, or five years from now, will surely be different from what it is today. Any long term character of mine – and my two longest duration characters went for fourteen and twenty-three real time years respectively – will be affected by his experiences. No kidding.  But of how many of us can't that be said, in real life? Are none of us changed by our experiences? Does that therefore mean our pasts don't matter at all? If we were to sit down at a coffee house and get to know one another, how many of you would respond with "What I've done, what I've seen, what's happened to me, who I am; none of that matters worth a damn. All any of you need to know about me is what you observe from this moment forward."  To which I'd likely respond with an "Ooookay" and turn to the next guy, hoping he wasn't quite so weird and/or combative as all of that.

* So you think that players who submit backstories are pulling themselves out of interactions with the other players in favor of their own narratives?  Stipulating so, so what? My job as a GM isn't to get people to play the way I think they ought to play, but to have fun at my table. With the proviso that it's a cooperative genre, and that there's a point beyond which freelancing isn't possible, what a backstory does is to give the player more tools for roleplay. It is not only not my job to compel each player to deal only with the stimuli presented by the other players, no one has ever adequately explained why I'd want to do so.  Beyond that, you're talking something that's unenforceable. I'm not a mindreader. I have no idea what's going on in any of my players' heads. As long as my players are paying attention to the action instead of their electronics, well ... that's seemingly a tough enough thing for the 21st century GM to ask, from everything I see and hear. I decline to worry about Goodthink and Goodspeak.

* So you resent the time you “waste” reading them?  As a GM, I like to know things about characters. I don't require backstories, but I appreciate them, and backstories engender interesting plot tailored to them.  I don't require that they be expertly written; they're tools, not literary exercises, and I'm not grading on style.  Does that mean I "suffer" through turgid writing every rare once in a while?  I can't say so, because I'm not remotely enough of a whiner to complain about the two and a half minutes "wasted" in going over a four-page backstory (I just timed myself reading an example I'd saved) every year or two.  What was I going to do with those 150 seconds, get into another Internet discussion?

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Ultimately, my longstanding belief is that the hatred of backstories comes from fear. Fear that the player's somehow "better" than the GM, fear that he or she will demand more, fear that the player will somehow "take over," fear of anything not fitting into the paradigm. Because sure: there are drama queens out there who expect the world to conform to the backstory. I can even remember one player who was. That's ONE player, out of 176, over 43 years. And I dealt with that the same as I've dealt with other uncooperative players over the years. It would never occur to me to avoid backstories forever because ONE player tried -- and only *tried* -- to abuse them, the same way it would never occur to me to disallow mages (or aristocrats, or rogues, or character generation, or combat ...) because a couple players went off the reservation. 

I will accept the possibility that there are gaming circles out there riddled with drama queens and prima donnas, clutching their scripts with white-knuckled grips, and acting like a Hoffman or a Streisand towards anything or anyone daring to dent their preconceptions, while wimp GMs tremble in fear at the prospect of confronting them.  

But I don't swallow that the syndrome's endemic in the gaming world, nor that the term "backstory" imposes an obligation upon a GM or a gaming group of a script that must be followed to the letter.  Seriously, naysayers, grow up.